#90DaysOfDevOps - The Go Workspace - Day 10

The Go Workspace

On Day 8 we briefly covered the Go workspace to get Go up and running to get to the demo of Hello #90DaysOfDevOps But we should explain a little more about the Go workspace.

Remember we chose the defaults and we then went through and created our Go folder in the GOPATH that was already defined but in reality, this GOPATH can be changed to be wherever you want it to be.

If you run

echo $GOPATH

The output should be similar to mine (with a different username may be) which is:

/home/michael/projects/go

Then here, we created 3 directories. src, pkg and bin

src is where all of your Go programs and projects are stored. This handles namespacing package management for all your Go repositories. This is where you will see on our workstation we have our Hello folder for the Hello #90DaysOfDevOps project.

pkg is where your archived files of packages that are or were installed in programs. This helps to speed up the compiling process based on if the packages being used have been modified.

bin is where all of your compiled binaries are stored.

Our Hello #90DaysOfDevOps is not a complex program so here is an example of a more complex Go Program taken from another great resource worth looking at GoChronicles

This page also goes into some great detail about why and how the layout is like this it also goes a little deeper on other folders we have not mentioned GoChronicles

Compiling & running code

On Day 9 we also covered a brief introduction to compiling code, but we can go a little deeper here.

To run our code we first must compile it. There are three ways to do this within Go.

go build
go install
go run

Before we get to the above compile stage we need to take a look at what we get with the Go Installation.

When we installed Go on Day 8 we installed something known as Go tools which consist of several programs that let us build and process our Go source files. One of the tools is Go

It is worth noting that you can install additional tools that are not in the standard Go installation.

If you open your command prompt and type go you should see something like the image below and then you will see "Additional Help Topics" below that for now we don't need to worry about those.

You might also remember that we have already used at least two of these tools so far on Day 8.

The ones we want to learn more about are the build, install and run.

go run - This command compiles and runs the main package comprised of the .go files specified on the command line. The command is compiled to a temporary folder.
go build - To compile packages and dependencies, compile the package in the current directory. If Go project contains a main package, it will create and place the executable in the current directory if not then it will put the executable in the pkg folder, and that can be imported and used by other Go programs. go build also enables you to build an executable file for any Go Supported OS platform.
go install - The same as go build but will place the executable in the bin folder.

We have run through go build and go run but feel free to run through them again here if you wish, go install as stated above puts the executable in our bin folder.

Hopefully, if you are following along, you are watching one of the playlists or videos below. I am taking bits of all of these and translating these into my notes so that I can understand the foundational knowledge of the Golang language. The resources below are likely going to give you a much better understanding of a lot of the areas you need overall, but I am trying to document the 7 days or 7 hours worth of the journey with interesting things that I have found.

Resources

See you on Day 11.